DAGv3 comments (part 2) by Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc.

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

DAGv3 Comments (part 2) by Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc.

Submitted By: George Kirikos
Company: Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc.
Company URL: http://www.leap.com/
Date: November 22, 2009

In addition to our prior comments of today:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/3gtld-guide/msg00085.html

we'd like to add a specific comment regarding the pricing caps issue (we did 
not dissect the guidebook line by line, as the entire set of documents is an 
abomination that shouldn't have credibility within the community).

For prices charged to consumers, the current language is at 2.10 (page 4) of:

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-agreement-specs-clean-04oct09-en.pdf

It's still not enough. It still allows unrestricted prices, because
there's a loophole "Registry Operator shall offer all domain registration 
renewals at the same price, unless the registrant agrees to a higher price at 
the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and 
conspicuous disclosure of such renewal price by Registry Operator." which they 
put in square brackets for some reason. Namely, the registries will simply have 
everyone agree that they could change the price at any time in their agreements 
that no one (except people like me) ever reads. Althernatively, they could 
raise the price for everyone by the same amount (e.g. make all renewals be 
$1000, or whatever), but then provide hidden discounts to others under the 
table, etc. There needs to be *hard caps*, e.g. no more than twice the .com 
price, for example.

Under the current language, for example, VeriSign (using the equitable 
treatment clause) could uniformly raise the price of all .com domain renewals 
to $50 or $100.

ICANN and the pro-TLD advocates talk about how all this "new competition" is 
going to benefit consumers through lower prices. Instead of talking the talk, 
they should "walk the walk" by putting in the hard caps. Hard caps only 
negatively affect registries that want to *raise* prices. It doesn't
hurt those legitimate registries who go into the game telling everyone that 
they'll be lowering prices for consumers. In other words, the only people who 
hard caps are going to negatively affect are the pro-TLD advocates who are 
lying to the public about the benefits of new TLDs, the ones who have their 
fingers crossed behind their backs and are talking about "lower prices" with a 
"wink" to their pals at ICANN.

Hard caps are a must to maximize benefits to the public, and indeed the 
registry operations should be regularly tendered through open competition like 
any other procurement contract (i.e. the concept of "presumptive renewal" for 
registry operators should be eliminated). The only "presumptive renewal" rights 
should belong to *registrants* who keep paying their *normal* fees, without 
being gouged by monopolist registry operators.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.leap.com/